


you never told me (and now it’s too late)

by mermistia



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Crying, Emotional Hurt, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Mental Breakdown, but i’ve has a shitty day and i needed to write angst so let’s go lesbians, this is an incoherent piece of crap that doesn’t even make sense or flow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-17 06:11:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21049622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mermistia/pseuds/mermistia
Summary: Catra is dead, and her last words brought back too many memories for Adora to handle.





	you never told me (and now it’s too late)

**Author's Note:**

> me?? posting something that’s not riverway?? unrealistic, blocked

Catra is gone.

She’s _gone._

Her body is in the water, bleeding warm red into cold blue, her claws are sticky with mud, her hair is matted close to her face.

Adora can’t stand the sight.

She runs.

Branches crunch under She-Ra’s feet, scraping her knees above her boots, and she stomps them down with a huff, slapping each and every leaf and branch and stick out of her face with enough force to bring down a tree. Perfuma would be horrified at her attack on nature, she knows, but she finds it hard to care.

It’s so fucking hard to care.

And why should she try to, really?

She cares, she cares, she _cared._ And it broke her. She cared so fucking much, about girls with pink hair and boys with arrows and princesses with powers and laughter and pranks and all the times spent curled up in her bed in the barracks, Catra’s tail brushing softly against her wrist, she cared about it all, and it broke her so badly. All of her love was torn by swords and slashed by claws and shot by guns and now it’s broken, lying in pieces on the ground. It’s broken and bleeding and dying out along with Catra, all limp wrists and closed eyes and shattered hearts that are too broken to fix.

She cared so much. 

She cared too much.

She doesn’t know if she wants to care anymore.

She does really, she supposes. There’s still so much to love. So much to protect. So much to love to love to _love_, to care about, the princesses and queens and friends and family that she’d never thought she’d have.

Family. 

Caring. 

Family. 

Love. 

Family. 

Incomplete. 

Catra, gone.

Her sword appears in a flash of light and she swings it into a tree with a scream, leaving it stuck in the wood as she drops to her knees and cries, letting each sob and thought and nightmare pour out of her in tears that taint her mouth with the taste of salt, mixing with the blood on her tongue.

Catra is dead. 

Dead. 

Dead and corrupted and gone.

Her body sunk into the water. No one noticed. Glimmer kept teleporting. Bow kept shooting. Ice and water and plants and wind and nets kept spinning through the air, and no one noticed Catra sinking underwater, no one saw the knife or the blood or the clawed hands reaching out desperately for help. 

Only Adora saw. 

She sees it again.

She doesn’t think she’ll ever stop seeing it.

Catra crying. Catra, bleeding. Catra, dead in her arms, clinging weakly onto her wrists, so small and fragile and tired, so small. She had smiled. Adora remembers. Catra had smiled softly, a shaking hand gripping onto strands of She-Ra’s hair, pulling her close in a way that had hurt more than a little. 

Catra hurt her. Even in her last moments, she sent pain through Adora’s head. 

Even in her last moments, Catra was fighting, in a way. Soft and tender and warm and full of so much love and yet she was still _fighting,_ pulling hard at Adora’s hair and scratching hard at her arms. 

Adora looks down. 

There’s still claw marks covering her arms, laced with mud and dirt and things that she doesn’t care enough to identify, streaking over her skin in an angry red, blood still flowing and flowing and dripping. They don’t hurt. Or maybe they do, and she just can’t feel it. She wonders dully if Catra did this to her on purpose, if even as she died, she _meant_ to hurt, to cut, to make Adora bleed. 

Adora hopes not. 

She hopes that Catra wouldn’t be that cruel. 

That isn’t the Catra that she wants to remember. 

Yet somehow, it’s the Catra that’s at the forefront of her mind. She wants to forget, to remember only each happy part of Catra. Laughter, smiles, hugs, kisses, whispering 8-year-olds in the dead of night. She wants to remember those parts so badly, to fill her mind with the old memories of a life she once thought would last forever, memories of a girl she once thought would love her forever. 

But that’s not healthy. 

She can’t live while she’s stuck in memories of the past, memories that lie about the present. 

Adora knows that.

They aren’t in love. 

Catra doesn’t love her. 

Does she?

Catra did love her, Adora thinks. 

Did she? 

Did she did she did she did she did she?

Catra loved her. 

Catra broke her. 

Adora screams again, pounding against the ground with clenched fists, ignoring the scratches that sting her hands with every punch. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. Except it doesn’t, and she’s so numb that she doesn’t realise she’s still punching, making dent after dent in the ground as she screams Catra’s name with a thousand different emotions. 

Happy. 

In love.

Happy, so _happy,_ Catra holding her close, Catra’s warmth pressed against her chest, Catra making her laugh in a million different ways, and Adora is floating, her eyes are closed and she’s floating, tears slipping down her cheeks as a pain grows in her throat. 

Another scream, Catra’s name leaving blood on her lips and pain in her heart.

Angry. 

Sad. 

_Angry, so fucking angry, so full of swords and claw marks and shattered glass and words scrawled in journals and sad letters that never got sent and everything that broke between them._

Mud splatters across her face, her arms, her shoulders, and Adora blinks, swallowing hard. What is she doing?

Is she forgetting already?

Is she forgetting everything that Catra has done?

Is she letting Catra break her, destroy her, ruin her, even in death?

She’ll remember the good times. 

The happiness. 

She’ll remember the bad. 

Catra fighting and screaming and yelling.

I DON’T CARE

I WON’T LET YOU WIN

I’D RATHER SEE THE WHOLE WORLD END

THAN

LET 

THAT

H

A

P

P

E

N

It was a good kind of love, a bad kind of love, wrapped into one. But it doesn’t matter now. 

Catra’s gone. 

Adora held her in her arms. 

She heard Catra’s last words.

“I guess I had something to fight for after all, huh, Princess?” 

_I guess I had something to fight for._

_Something to fight for._

_Someone to fight for._

_Someone to love._

Catra was never one for strong displays of affection. 

Catra was never one for love. 

But she said it, _she said it,_ using her dying breath to finally let it out. 

Adora realised too late.

Catra said it too late. 

_I guess I had something to fight for._

_I fought for you._

_I love you._

_I love you, Adora._

**Author's Note:**

> i hate that i hate this what are words 
> 
> anyway i’m @mermistia on tumblr and i’m also @thesamecatraeveryday there too which is where the hcs that inspired this fic are


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